Below is a summary of how the foundation will support research at Freie Universität Berlin.

Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellows

The mathematician Tobias Hurth will be researching random processes as an Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. These processes and their parameter-dependent changes are commonplace in science and technology, but the mathematic theory of bifurcations in these types of systems have yet to be researched in greater depth. Hurth, together with Dr. Maximilian Engel, who is the head of the MATH+ Excellence Cluster’s Junior Research Group, will be expanding the key points of ergodic theory to localized random processes and further developing stochastic bifurcation theory from an analytical and numerical standpoint. Lyapunov exponents will be the primary focus of this research and will serve to develop an appropriate concept on measurements of entropy and equilibrium. These theoretical findings could lead to a better understanding of chemical reaction networks. The group, led by Engel, will also study stochastic bifurcations in order to expand their analysis to include biological models of gene expression, cell growth, and random dynamics in deep neural networks.

The biologist Maxwell Ware from Colorado State University will also be coming to Freie Universität Berlin as an Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellow. Alongside Dr. Dennis Nürnberg, the head of the Emmy Noether research group, he will work on developing a process that could replace the conventional production of nitrogen fertilizers – which is typically done according to the extremely energy intensive Haber-Bosch process – with a more sustainable photosynthetic process. Ware is researching the symbiotic relationship between plants and a newly discovered strain of cyanobacteria. Just like other cyanobacteria, this strain is able to reduce atmospheric nitrogen using specific cell types by means of a natural enzyme (nitrogenase), which plants do not have. The cyanobacterium in question can also carry out photosynthesis using dark-red light, which means that it does not compete with plants for the same light spectrum. In order to determine whether this process also affects the nitrogen fixation of these organisms, the bacteria and their hosts will be artificially modified. The molecular, metabolic, and morphological mechanisms will then be studied under different environmental conditions.

Einstein Research Projects

A team led by Professor Stefan Rinke, a scholar of Latin American history at Freie Universität, and Professor Stefanie Schüler-Springorum from the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universität Berlin will be conducting research within an Einstein project titled “Testimonies of Jews Returning to Berlin from Latin America (1945/49–1970).” Between 1933 and the end of the Second World War, Latin America was a main destination for those fleeing persecution under the Nazi regime. Following the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany, it became a notorious haven for a number of war criminals. German Jews who remigrated from Latin America to West Germany between 1945 and 1970 were often buoyed by the hope that they would be able to take back their stolen property under the new German Restitution Laws. The documents detailing these efforts, in which survivors provide information about their lives and living arrangements under National Socialism and in Latin America, are stored in files at the State of Berlin’s restitution authorities. These documents and sources from German and Latin American archives will be studied within the project in order to form a clearer picture of how Jewish refugees experienced exile in Latin America. It will focus on family circumstances and networks, knowledge acquisition, the perpetuation of anti-Semitism, and the issues of remigration and restitution in Berlin during the post-war period. The main cooperative partners for researching and analyzing the documents will include the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, the University of Potsdam, and the Ibero-American Institute. The Jewish Museum, Stiftung Exilmuseum, and the Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation will also be involved in the project.

Einstein Foundation Doctoral Program

The Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies (FSGS) was one of two structured graduate programs to receive financial support via the recently established Einstein Foundation Doctoral Program award. The FSGS is a structured doctoral program that was funded through the Excellence Initiative of the federal and state governments from 2007 through 2019. It gained Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as an important cooperating institution in 2012. Since 2019 the FSGS has been closely associated with the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” and has taken on responsibilities with regard to its doctoral candidates. The graduate school promotes projects with a comparative literature focus in which temporal or monolingual limits are transcended or literature is juxtaposed with other aesthetic media. The FSGS will use the funding from the Einstein Foundation to set up a digital pre-doc program for students with a master’s degree who come from the Global South. Participants in the program will receive support in preparing their doctoral research project and acquiring third-party funding with the aid of virtual courses and counseling services that can be attended remotely from their home country. They also receive funding for a twelve-month stay in Berlin.